Skip to main content

The Community Side

Posted by daniel on March 7, 2005 at 8:31 AM EST

Building a City

A sentence from Richard Gabriel's ACM career recognition award has stayed with me. They note that "Gabriel conceived of java.net as a self-creating and self-governed web place where communities join to build a city of diverse interests engaged in using the Java language and technology in routine and innovative ways."

So how are we doing? There is nothing in his original notion about the publication side of java.net. The home page for java.net originally updated weekly with a daily newspaper-like page called "Java Today". Many more people were heading to the daily page than the weekly page so our efforts were moved to the front page. We've tried many things on this page and some have worked and some haven't. (We're going to try the bookclub one more time). We can always improve this part of the site and are always working to do so.

But what about the other side? Technically we have updated the project hosting component of the site as well. We have added and are working to add new features that you have requested. So we have tools for hosting projects and for communicating with project members and the greater community. Communities also have their own set of tools for communicating with others.

Looking at Dick's goals, I think java.net is a self-creating and self-governed web place (of course, if you don't think so, you are welcome to weigh in below). I just don't know what we should do to get to that last part - we have communities who are here and many of them are vibrant. The leaders have found different ways to spread news of activity. Fabiane produces a great newsletter and RSS feeds for JavaTools, Daniel, Eduardo, and James blog frequently about new items in GELC, WS, and JXTA, and Kathy constantly updates the JavaDesktop homepage and lets me know when there are new items to feature. How do we form a "city of diverse interests"? We're still trying to understand what that means and what that requires.

Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart writes that The Javadocs are coming - and that's good! in today's Weblogs . " The Javadocs for JAXB 2.0 and for J2SE 6.0 are now available at Java.Net, and others will follow. Releasing the javadocs of these, ongoing specifications is "a (very) good thing" (tm) "

Joerg Plewe asks Will federated databases die out? His post examines the question "Can unstructured information + cool technology do the job?"

Ed Burns checks in from TheServerSide again with Notes from keynote panel . Thanks Ed for comprehensive coverage of the conference. We'll combine links to his blogs into a single feature tomorrow.

In Also in Java Today , WS-Addressing is a new specification that may soon be of significant interest to web services developers, filling some of the gaps left by basic SOAP-based messaging. As Beth Linker writes in Introduction to WS-Addressing, a feature from sister site dev2dev.bea.com, "SOAP does not provide a standard way to specify where a message is going, how to return a response, or where to report an error. Those details have historically been left up to the transport layer." WS-Addressing offers more flexibility in these areas, and more.

Kode Vicious answers a question from Fond of Abstractions on an officemate who "writes methods that are 1,000 lines long and claims they are easier to understand than if they were broken down into a smaller set of methods. How can we convince him his code is a maintenance nightmare?" The other half of the article answers another question by recommending the use of informative comments in CMS checkins.

In Projects and Communities, in part two of a series on Wireless messaging with JXTA, Faheem Khan explains how to implement the bridge between a J2ME client and a JMS application using JXTA-for-JMS.

In Better Profiling through Code Hotswapping, Micha Dmitriev explains "Code hotswapping is probably the most powerful way to address the performance problems of profiling, while still collecting useful data."

There is a threaad on the language Nice in today's Forums. MarkF writes "Aside from that, Nice's multimethods and alternative constructor layout are too different from Java. Adding them to Java would go beyond a simple extension; it would be transforming Java into a different language. This thread isn't really about debating Nice's merits, but whether some subset of its features could be used to extend Java in a positive way."

Subanark has an extended post on Const values. "I have come up with a semantic for const values. Its a bit complex, but I think it will work. Its probably too late for const to be in mustang, but I hope it will be available in dolphin. [details in full post]"

In today's java.net News Headlines :

Registered users can submit news items for the java.net News Page using our news submission form. All submissions go through an editorial review before being posted to the site. You can also subscribe to thejava.net News RSS feed.

Current and upcoming Java Events :

Registered users can submit event listings for the java.net Events Page using our events submission form. All submissions go through an editorial review before being posted to the site.

Archives and Subscriptions: This blog is delivered weekdays as the Java Today RSS feed. Also, once this page is no longer featured as the front page of java.net it will be archived along with other past issues in the java.net Archive.

Building a City
Blog Links >>